Content note: Descriptions of homophobic and racist situations the author was present for during their coming of age years in two Independent Fundamental Baptist churches and their associated schools.
By Rebekah Palmer
In my childhood church, we used to bring in an evangelist who would preach that anytime a Black person was married to a white person, it was in rebellion against God’s order for humanity.
Curiously, this was often implied when the situation was a Black man and a white woman. If it was reversed, a white man and a Black woman, the implication was more than rebellion — it was complete disgust. Which played into the narrative of the myth that there is innate purity in being a white female that must be preserved over the purity potential in a female of color.
Nothing much was communicated beyond the racial binary of Black and white growing up Independent Fundamental Baptist.
Realities about the world containing multiple races and ethnicities often eluded them because they promoted the worldly blood quantum theory known as the “one drop rule” which the US government used from their European forebears in it’s founding and into the 20th century to determine if a person was legally a Native American or African American in creating policies about other races besides what they deemed as “white.”
The church associated with the Bible college I attended (that was one of the few approved colleges that my childhood church and school encouraged its high school graduates to attend) often lended their pulpit to a traveling evangelist preacher who outright used vulgar words for people of different races and sexualities.
It was 2005-2010 when I attended Bible college, so Arabians and Muslims were not spoken of in nuanced ways, but were equated as all Arabians must be Muslims and called “crooked nose sand n******s”.
The evangelist stormed on in his sermons that the Middle East should be where we relocated Disney world, painted it pink for the f*gs, and blow that whole portion of the world off the globe. The pastor of the church encouraged this guest speaker because he believed the USA did West Africans a favor by taking part with Europeans in the international slave trade because now Black Americans enjoy US American rights today.
I was exposed to the most racist jokes involving Scripture from attending IFB churches, and those jokes were told by both white women and white men in Sunday school and during church services. It wasn’t racist Hollywood, but trusted teachers and their prejudice surrounding multiple races and ethnicities and humans of varying genders and sexualities that imparted racist thoughts and ideas into my emerging brain.
I overheard a conversation between two white female professors at my Bible college. I will call them white woman 1 and white woman 2.
WW1: “I had this girl in my Sunday school class giving me attitude all morning.”
WW2: “Was she Black?”
WW1: “No! She was white! But with a Black girl attitude.”
That’s how I learned the trope of the angry Black woman mainstream American media promotes. I wondered what kind of attitude Black females had that got the feeling labeled as specifically identified to their race and gender.
Upon leaving the fundamentalist movement and evangelical Baptist religion in 2016, I learned about homophobia, misogyny, racism, sexism, and transphobia. Breonna Taylor’s death happened.
And I realized how powerful and righteous Black female anger truly is.
Back at my Bible college between 2008-2010, the pastor of the church had been widowed, so the dean of women had all the college girls meet in the chapel one night for a recreation purpose just for the ladies. Four of the college women had been selected to do a skit and create female caricatiures based on common female tropes to present as dating options for the preacher. One white woman chose to impersonate an impoverished Black woman. Not as flattery, but rather in jest to further this racist trope, the preacher chose the Black woman stereotype as his dating choice.
While my former Bible college would condemn shows like the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and RuPaul’s Drag Race — they used similar entertainment style in performing comedy roasts and the above mentioned dating game, except that they had no concept of boundaries surrounding the ages of the audience and participants and what is acceptable to jest about a human being and what is off-limits.
So much fatphobia and fear of what is disabled, queer, and female permeated the recreational spaces.
And it was always specifically Black women or variations in gender and sexuality and ability that was harmed most.
Listening and reading from Ola Ojewumi, founder of Project Ascend and Sacred Hearts Children’s Transplant Foundation, reading about intersectional feminism from Kimberle Crenshaw, and reading So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo along with Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women that a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall allowed for my emotional, mental, and spiritual growth beyond the strict ableist, homophobic, racist, sexist, and transphobic parameters that surrounded my coming of age in predominantly white IFB church congregations.
At the same time, those churches I grew up inside supported missionaries to many nations all over the world. While missionaries were expected to teach national foreigners the gospel, they often did it with an elitist white American filter over the Scripture they interpreted.
When the missionaries were Black, Indian, or Latinx and presented their work to other nations, their accents were made fun of by the white preacher hosting and American patriotic nationalism was called into question. While the white American missionaries were praised for maintaining a semblance of US American identity in the children they raised overseas, the missionaries whose nation of origin was in Central or South America or Asia or Africa were condemned for keeping a semblance of their cultural identity in the land they chose to share the gospel.
It was telling when my freshman class of 2005 as a whole got labeled the weird incoming freshman class because we as a group actually *gasp* made friends with the Spanish-speaking students in our supposedly sister school on campus. I learned the most about care and compassionate ministry from them in their dorm rooms than any class that was taught by paid staff! Their impact led me down the path to question what I was being taught about my skin color (I am of German and French heritage and am a white American) that was represented in a world fraught with prejudice based on where a person and their ancestors originally exist.
Reading white USA culture and politics into the Bible, a sacred text originally written in cultures that spoke Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek, creates a maddening and toxic community using a King James English Version to control its members into hostile and violent behavior.
It truly is part of the problem with the USA today as the president elected in 2016 and 2024 inflamed this extreme sect of evangelicalism to feel validated in how they see the world through what they sincerely are taught, so they sincerely believe this filter is also how God must also see their world.
Rebekah Palmer (she/they) holds a degree in Professional Communication and Emerging Media from UW-Stout in Menomonie, WI in addition to a religious degree in parochial school teaching and secretarial training. She currently serves as the Vice President of Awareness and Education at Next Generation of Cystinosis. She is a dedicated rare disease advocate and a published author, and her articles have appeared on the rare news website PatientWorthy, digital magazine Rare Revolution, and #RareIs. She identifies as a white, disabled, Christian, queer and non-binary human.
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